Alexis Soyer (Radio Edit)

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Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner.

I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster.

And today, we are tying our aprons and firing up the stove as we learn all about 19th-century celebrity chef Alexise Soyer.

And to help us, we have two very special dining companions in History Corner.

She's an author, broadcaster and food historian, specialising in food from 1600 to the present day.

That's a lot of food.

You might have heard her on BBC Radio 4's The Kitchen Cabinet or read one of her many wonderful books, including The Greedy Queen, all about Queen Victoria's food tastes.

And you'll definitely remember her from our delicious episode on the history of ice cream.

It's Dr.

Annie Gray.

Welcome back, Annie.

Thank you for having me.

Lovely to have you back.

And in Comedy Corner, he's a comedian, podcaster, writer, broadcaster.

He's a superstar.

He He co-hosts the mega award-winning off-menu podcast.

He judges dishes on the Great British menu.

He has done gags on Mock the Week.

He's had an existential crisis on Taskmaster Champion of Champions.

Sorry, Ed, I had to mention it.

You may love his food-themed memoir, Glutton, the multi-course life of a very greedy boy.

And you'll remember him from our episodes on Lord Byron and Gothic vampire literature.

It's Ed Gamble.

Welcome back, Ed.

Thanks for having me back.

Delighted.

Ed, you are the foodiest comedian in the UK.

It's certainly an avenue that I've pursued, I would say.

You know, once you get a thing, you've really got to lock in.

I'm just out there mopping up every single food theme job possible.

And you don't even like food.

You've just found a niche.

What do you know about food history?

Are you happy in the 19th century?

I mean,

I can't promise to offer much historically in terms of food history.

I can barely remember what I ate last week.

So, what do you know?

This is where we have a go at guessing what our lovely listener might know about today's subject.

And we all can name a celebrity chef, right?

Some of them are so famous they only need one name: Delia, Jamie, Nigella.

But Alexey Suye, probably not ringing any bells for you.

You're probably not going to know about him unless you are a student of 19th-century military history or culinary history.

That's the kind of the Venn diagram of people who might know.

I'm none of those things.

So, who was this French celebrity chef who found fame in Britain?

Why is he known to ex-soldiers?

Just what is a magic stove?

Let's find out, right?

Okay, Dr.

Annie, first things first.

Where and when was little Alexi born and to whom?

He was born in 1810, so in what to us Brits is the Regency period.

So think about Jane Austen, Colin Firth coming out of the lake, that kind of thing.

Born in France in a town called Meaux Ombri, which was known for its mustard and its cheese.

So I think it would be kind to call Alexi working class.

He was on that sort of liminal zone that you find so often in the Victorian period between working class and actually abject poverty.

Something he never forgot about.

He was always desperate for social respectability later on in life.

Born in Bree.

He was born in the home of Brie.

That's pretty good, isn't it?

Yeah, surrounded by cheese in the labour ward.

Do you want to guess what his childhood professional training was?

You would have thought if you're born in Brie, you're going to be

a cow.

You may be a cow.

Maybe you work within dairy or cheese, etc.

Or mustard.

You mustn't forget the mustard.

No, muta.

So, yeah, maybe he's a spicy cow.

And

he was training for the priesthood.

Yeah, so he was a Protestant, which is relatively rare in France at that point.

So they sent him off to a Protestant seminary because he had a very good singing voice.

So one presumes he could get a scholarship.

And his beginnings are quite kind of murky because there's lots of stories that he told about himself, the truth of which.

Anyway, so the story goes that he decided to get expelled by breaking out of his dormitory, climbing up the cathedral tower, and ringing the bells, which, bearing in mind, that was also the signal for Armageddon,

released all hell upon the town.

So the local fire brigade came out and the local garrison.

So, as you can imagine, he didn't last very long.

The other priests would have been like, man, this is such a bad boy.

Yeah, he is.

Yeah, he is.

He's the bad boy of the Belle Squad.

So it was bye-bye Brie for teenage Alexei.

So what was next for our balshy bell boy?

Well, next, he got pushed off to Paris to go and stay with his brother Philippe, who was a chef.

And by all accounts, he sort of decided that, okay, well, yeah, fine, he'd go into chefing, largely because it was a really good excuse to drink a lot and party.

So, he became a real party animal.

He worked his way up through Parisian society, as a lot of chefs did at that point, and he ended up being the chef at the Foreign Office.

And this is in 1830.

1830, there was another revolution, the July Revolution in this case, which didn't last long but did topple the monarch at the time.

They stormed the kitchens where Soyer was in the middle of catering a banquet and this mob broke into the kitchens.

They shot two of the chefs and all hell broke loose and it, you know, it was genuinely a very dangerous moment.

But because Soyer was very good at thinking on his feet, he quickly whipped off his apron and started singing La Marseillaise.

So what actually happened was he was hoisted on the shoulders of the revolutionaries who took him out of the kitchen scene, what a hero, what a patriot, presumably not recognising who he was.

And then once he was out of the kitchens, he scarpered.

But he then got a reputation as being this sort of shill for the monarchists.

And he was persona non grata, couldn't get a job anywhere in France.

He followed Brother Philippe over to England, which was again a tried and tested route for Parisian chefs.

They all sort of drifted over to England.

So he saves his life by singing the French national anthem.

What song could you sing to save your life if a crowd broke into?

Well, it depends.

I mean, obviously, it depends what the crowd are for, right?

Because I'm happy to capitulate to any

instantly.

I just want to save my own skin.

I've got absolutely no ethics whatsoever.

They're angry at the concept of podcasting.

They hate podcasts.

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What are you going to do?

I guess I'm singing the Radio Four Pips just

to let them know I am a traditionalist when it comes to broadcasting.

You're doing the shipping forecast.

I'm doing the shipping forecast.

You know, I like live radio.

That's where, like...

Alexei Soye, fleeing violence, going from revolutionary France into Britain in 1831, which is during the reign of...

We're not at Victoria yet, are we?

William IV, the sort of most non-entity monarchy.

No one's favourite king.

So he worked for the Duke of Cambridge.

He went to work at Stafford House, which was probably the grandest house in London, over onto the Welsh borders to go and work for a family called the Lloyds, and eventually networked his way into working as the head chef at the Reform Club, which was a liberal gentleman's club founded by people who had favoured the Reform Act of 1832.

And he was there specifically to cook the best, most fashionable food.

We know now that Alexei Soye is a whiz in the kitchen, right?

But he's also a whiz with a kitchen.

Do you know what I mean by that?

In terms of running the kitchen.

More than that, in terms of the technology in a kitchen.

Okay, so the equipment as well.

Yeah, he's innovating in that way.

It's quite interesting, Annie.

And I don't know whether he's the pioneer, because I know he likes to sort of build his part a little bit.

So I don't know whether he's like really, really inventing or whether he's just sort of popularising.

But he brings a lot of stuff into the kitchen.

I think it's a mixture of both.

He was quite well known for finding sort of small-scale inventors and such and then buying out their invention and kind of popularising it or building on it.

But he was absolutely an inventor in his own right as well.

He was always coming up with ideas.

With the Reform Club he worked with the architect to put in new kitchens just after he arrived and you know some of the stuff was fine.

There were separate departments for butchery and for lots of different larders and you know it was a huge complex of kitchens.

So far so normal.

But then he did things like install sliding chopping boards and sliding partitions so that everyone could have their own workspaces.

He made sure things were the right heights for shorter people, kitchen maids and people like that.

And then he went all out for steams.

He had a steam table.

It was steam heated so the dishes are staying hot.

There's temperature controlled oven.

And most of all, he was this huge champion for gas.

So gas had been in for lighting for quite a long time, but very, very few people had thought about cooking with it, partly because the size of the pipes was too small to get enough supply in.

But because he was building from new, he could make sure the pipes were made bigger so he could get this this gas into the kitchens.

And he was this enormous champion for cooking on gas.

He was experimenting with kitchen appliances as well.

So he claims we've invented many gadgets.

I'm not sure if he invents them or whether he licenses them.

I think what I've learned about this guy so far is we can't necessarily trust what he says.

You're definitely getting the hang of this episode.

Thank you, Ed.

Yeah.

So, which of these five gadgets, one of them's not true, did he not invent or at least popularize or claim to invent popularize?

Okay, so mechanical kitchen timer, plug strainer, a tendon separator for meat, an ice cream scoop or a cafeter for coffee.

Which of those five was not an Alexei Soye original?

Obviously, they're all big in my life.

The tendon separator, especially.

I'm going to go with the plug strainer.

It doesn't feel sort of grand enough.

It doesn't feel...

No, I'm going to go with that.

I mean, huge news if he really did invent the cafeteria, but.

The cafeteria he does invent.

He invented it.

Yeah.

So, no, the one that I...

I'm afraid I caught you out there, ice cream scoop is not his.

It comes later, later in the century.

Thinking about it, the plug strainer is almost the sink cafeteria, isn't it?

And also, really important because blocks drains at that point in time.

Very, very difficult to clean them when you don't have diner rod.

Yes, a cafeteria is one of his.

Wow.

Kitchen timer?

Pretty clever, isn't it?

What is one utensil that you wish someone had invented, or perhaps you could invent right now, that desperately we need in kitchens?

Hey, look, if I could invent a kitchen utensil that we desperately need in kitchens, I wouldn't be here.

I'd be.

You've got a dragon's den, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

In Back to the Future 2, they have that sort of rehydrating oven thing where they get a tiny pizza delivered and they put it in the oven and hit it and then five seconds later it's a full-size pizza.

That.

Yes.

I'd like that.

Yes, yes, please.

And I know there are like, you know, dehydrators and whatever and all of that, but I just want something that makes food massive.

I mean, I'm here for it.

Yeah, that's absolutely.

I'd buy it.

Yeah.

So the ice cream scoop comes later in the century.

The others are Alexei Soye, originals, caveat, maybe not originals, but certainly he's popularising them and claiming them.

Yeah, and everyone builds on the shoulders of others.

I get the feeling he's fun in the kitchen, but 1837 was a spicy year for him romantically as well, because this is where he meets his good lady wife.

Well, he's already met her.

He meets her in 1835, I think.

Okay.

So in Paris, he'd already had a relationship with a lady called Adelaide Le Mans and almost certainly had a son by her, or at least later on, the son called himself Alexei Soyer, and they had some lovely tete-a-tetete, and then Soye forgot about him in his will, so who knows?

But he, with typical aplomb, walked into the studio of a leading artist at one point and said, I want my picture painted because I'm Alexei Soye.

And the chat went, Yeah, right, whatever.

My stepdaughter can paint you.

So in comes the stepdaughter, and by all accounts, it was love at first sight.

So Soye courted this lady who was called Emma, Elizabeth Emma Jones.

And in 1837, they got married.

They had a really interesting marriage because she was a career woman and he was a career man, so they didn't really have what was by Victorian standards a conventional relationship at all.

She would be off travelling quite a lot, he worked quite a lot.

It does seem to have been a really lovely relationship, though.

Genuinely, when you read about it, it's gorgeous.

There are stories like she turned up at one point to go and wait for him in his office at the Reform Club and he didn't turn up for an hour.

So she just sketched herself on the wall as a visiting card and left.

And when he got back, he was so entranced by this picture that he had it framed.

I think it's better just to be there on time, though.

You could argue that.

That sounds lovely and romantic, but it's a pain, isn't it?

Well, I mean,

you could argue that.

It did have a tragic end, though.

Yes, she dies very young.

Very, very young.

So she became pregnant with their first child.

And about, I think it was only a couple of weeks before the child was due, Sui went off to Belgium.

She told him to go.

She was like, don't worry, don't worry, it's going to be absolutely fine.

And then there was this big storm, and her maid said, oh, I'm going to the theatre, but there's a big storm.

And Emma went, don't worry about it, I'll be fine.

Off the maid goes to the theatre.

There's a huge crash of lightning.

Emma starts to hemorrhage, she miscarries, there's nobody there, she's all alone, and by the time anybody realises what's going on, it's just too late, she loses the child, and she herself died as well.

And then he spent really the next two years planning this enormous memorial for her.

But it didn't last that long, his mourning period.

He sort of got back on the horse and took up with an Italian ballet dancer who was apparently

very voluptuous and called Fanny Torito.

But yeah, so Emma died in 1842, so their romance was quite short, but was very meaningful to me.

It sounds like a Victorian novel, doesn't it?

In the way that all builds.

You're right, really.

It's quite gothic, isn't it?

Yeah.

Does this sort of grief slow his rise, his culinary quest for stardom?

Because this is a man who's got drive.

He started really chasing glory, and one of the things he did, like all good chefs who really want to make a splash, is he started publishing cookery books.

The three best known are the the Gastronomic Regenerator, which was his first one in 1846.

Then there was The Modern Housewife in 1849, and then there was The Schilling Cookery for the People in 1854, which built on an earlier pamphlet called Swear's Charitable Cookery.

I don't know if it's in a different book, but we've got a couple of images to show you guys.

Oh, yeah.

And I wouldn't say that this is the 19th-century equivalent of cheese on toast.

Do you want to describe what you can see for us?

Yes.

Oh, my goodness.

These are not from the Schilling Cookery.

I should point out these are gastronomic regenerator dishes.

Something that appears appears to look like a sort of a big duck or a swan or a gull.

But is that a natural bird or are you supposed to form whatever you're cooking into a bird shape?

And then something else which looks like a roast turkey but also a galleon.

Yeah.

With little birds going all the way around it.

I mean, yeah,

that's a nightmare to me.

If I turned up somewhere and someone had done me that, I'm like, what a

total waste of time.

So Alexi Soye was releasing cookery books, but he also had other money-making schemes.

Ed, what do you think they might have been?

Deliveroo.

I mean, I wouldn't have put it past him, but I don't think he did that.

No, lots of people did, but not him.

Not him.

No, he went the other way.

He went very 21st century.

He went branded merch.

Wow.

Yeah.

In the 1840s, Alexei Soye is one of the first influencers in the food space.

And he invents the art form, Annie.

I'm coming out big for him.

I'm swinging for the fences with Alexei Soye.

I think he's a pioneer in this.

Yeah, he is.

Alexey decided to partner with Cross and Blackwell to produce a range of sauces.

He also did kitchen gadgets.

There was a stewing pan and there was an improved baking dish, and there were all the various bits you've sort of heard about already, but the big thing was the sauces.

Soye's sauce was marketed in two versions: there was a spicy one for the gentlemen, and then a milder one for the ladies.

You've always got to think of the ladies,

and their soft mouth.

Well, exactly.

Then there was Soyer's relish, which was for general purposes.

No one knows what was in this, but but it seems likely that it was a heavily garlic sauce, so perhaps also not the most sociable of sauces.

And he marketed that as being so perfect it would create a soul under the ribs of death, which is a quote from John Milton.

So, you know, he's aiming high with quotes from masters of the English language and religion from the seventeenth century.

I always say that when I eat something delicious.

Yeah, yeah.

He's also got his magic stove.

Ed, do you know what this this is?

No, I heard you mention the magic stove earlier.

I'm very excited.

Is it a bit like a Dutch oven?

I don't know what that is, so maybe.

It's when you fart and then push someone's head underneath the table.

So here's gas.

Yeah, yeah.

Annie, is it a Dutch oven?

No, actually, although I suspect if he'd been able to invent that one, he would have done it as well and marketed it in farts in a bottle.

But no, the magic stove is basically a camping stove.

So it's a miniature stove.

Again, it wasn't his invention per se, but he marketed it.

He never took out patents on it, which is a bit of a problem because ultimately he didn't make as much money as he could have done from them.

But he loved this magic stove.

It sold phenomenally well to anyone who was camping or traveling.

He made about £6,000 from it in the first year, which was a phenomenal amount of money at the time.

I'm assuming the Reform Club, where he's meant to work, they must be delighted.

No?

Their star chef is a superstar bringing in the cash.

Everyone knows him.

Surely people are queuing to eat at the Reform Club.

This is a win for them.

Well yeah, but there are members' clubs.

You don't want too many people queuing because you don't want the Hurry Peloi to get in, do you?

And I will be fair, he was stretching himself a little thin.

He increasingly didn't love being a subordinate.

He wanted to be the person that was the draw because he was.

And it all got a little bit tense, basically.

And then in 1850, they kind of offered him an ultimatum.

They basically said, look, either toe the line, start cooking here and turn up, or, you know, go away and do all your other things.

So he went, turn up,

and left.

So one thing that we haven't talked about yet is what Alexey Soyer looked like.

He walked into this room right now.

What are you imagining?

Well, there's two classic chef looks, right, that I'm thinking of, chefs from history.

Big fat red man

or little weasel rat boy.

Okay.

Those are the two.

Which one are you going?

You're looking at me right now, the weasly boy.

That's me.

No, no, I was looking at you anyway because I'm talking to you, Craig.

I'm not thinking Big Fat Red Man.

Okay.

I feel like he's got so much stuff going on, he doesn't really have time to indulge all of the time.

So I'm thinking more Weaseled little Rat Boy.

Okay, here is a portrait done by his wife Emma.

Okay, right.

So this is through his wife's eyes.

This is through yes exactly.

This is love for you.

Yeah, rap.

I was right.

So Annie, is he playing up to the Frenchiness here with the beret and the rat boy look?

He's not a rat boy.

This doesn't give you an impression of his height.

He was apparently quite tall and slender and very much in vogue.

The fashionable Victorian gentleman.

He very much voted.

That's back in, it's, you know, it's a rat it's a rat boy summer.

It is rat boy summer.

I like to think of him more as as soon as he entered a room, you'd know he was there just because he just must have oozed this energy and this interest.

He did play up on his Frenchness, but actually, that's not a beret, that's more like a sort of tamashanta.

He really loved things cut on the bias, so a la zugzug or a la zigzag, as he called it.

And like, it got really obsessive, like his business cards were cut in a zigzag way.

I mean, to be fair, a lot of people did actually take the mick out of what he wore because he did look at it.

He drew attention, didn't he?

He drew attention to himself, and certain people were like, this guy's a bit of a douchebag,

He's still being talked about.

Yeah.

So he's as stylish as Nigella, as French as Raymond Blanc.

And also, Alexi Soye is doing charity work.

He's a man of the people.

Do you know where he did charity work?

In which country?

So he's going outside of

going back to France to do charity work?

It's a good guess, but no.

No.

No?

Think of another country closer.

Another country.

Think of another country that is not France or England.

Germany?

Nope.

Spain.

No.

It's Ireland.

Oh, I should have guessed it.

So, Ed, have you heard of the Irish potato famine?

I have.

We're a comedy show, but I think for the next two, three minutes, it's a bit of a gear change.

This is a tragedy, right, Annie?

This is a million die.

Probably a million have to emigrate.

It's a devastating, horrible thing.

And he responds to it in a quite an interesting way.

Yeah, he does.

So Ireland is in dire, dire straits.

This all happens from 1843 when the potato blight hits Ireland and you have six years of awful harvests.

The English overlords just go, well, they're Irish, their fault, they're poor.

They didn't work very hard, did they?

And they just leave them to it for a couple of years.

And then eventually, the newspapers start saying, oh, hang on.

Do you know what?

Maybe it's not actually the poor's fault they're poor.

Maybe the fact that the Irish are all starving is because the English have taken all their crops and sold them abroad.

Oh, do you think you have to do something about this?

And very gradually, this movement builds, which is saying that perhaps some form of poor relief should be offered.

And Sawyer gets to hear about this.

He'd already had some dealings with the idea of feeding the poor and caring for the poor.

He set up soup kitchens in Spitalfield, Spitalfield.

So he had already kind of dabbled in the idea.

But in 1847, he decided to set up a soup kitchen under new principles, which classic soy

were basically factory feeding principles.

So the idea that there was this portable soup kitchen and you could feed about 5,000 people, feed 5,000 meals a day.

And you had a bowl in each position, you had a chained-down spoon, so people came in, they were fed their soup, they ate it, they got out really quickly, you swabbed out the bowls, you wiped down the spoon, the next lot came in.

And he took that out to Ireland, and there was a grand opening because he was never a man to miss up an opportunity for some publicity.

Sure.

And he devised all these recipes, which he said would feed people and be nutritionally, really brilliant.

And they weren't, I think it's fair to say.

It's problematic because I think his heart was really in the right place.

He genuinely wanted to do something, and I don't think he ever really thought that his soups were nutritionally sound.

He was accused of treating the poor like wild animals, which, you know, yes.

He was accused of treating the whole thing like a technical problem to be solved.

Eventually the tide turned and people started saying that actually this soup kitchen was a bad idea.

You know, when he first went out, everyone was like, great, what an amazing thing.

And the British government went, brilliant, we can blame it all on him.

Yeah, I mean, I was going to say,

he did something when the government did nothing.

But it wasn't necessarily the best thing.

So that was his first effort with charity relief.

He did another one.

He went to a war zone.

Wow.

Do you know which war zone this might be?

I can guess.

All of my guesses have been rubbish so far.

You might have have heard of this one, the Crimean War.

I have heard of that one.

Yeah, so that's a long way to travel.

This is 1855.

This is the, you know, we know about this war because of Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale, but for listeners who don't know where Skitari is, which is where he went to, Skitari, weirdly, is in Turkey, a totally different country to where the war was happening.

300 miles away.

Yes, but it was where the British troops who were fighting were taken to to, well, to die.

Let's not be.

They weren't meant to die there, but that's what happened.

But this is a war like every other war up to that point, but even worse, where the vast majority of casualties were from disease, not from fighting in action.

They'd get wounded or, you know, a bit, then they'd be put on a ship and then they'd be brought over to Skatari, and then they would be left on the dock where the rats would eat them as they died.

And eventually they converted a barracks into a hospital, which is where Florence Nightingale went out and tried desperately to reform.

I mean, there was nothing there.

It was falling down.

There was no furniture.

There were rats everywhere.

There was lice.

It was the conditions were horrific.

And for the first time, the newspapers in Britain reported on this and they reported on it in very critical terms.

So this became a real thing.

The British government was seen to be failing it to be.

So it brought down the Prime Minister.

They did.

Yeah.

And Suye heard about this and he wrote an open letter to the Times saying, I will go out there and I will sort out the catering and I will sort out the nutrition and I will sort out the kitchens.

And that is what he did.

And he brings his magic stove.

Of course he does.

Of course, it brings it everywhere.

It brings it everywhere, but it's really useful for the soldiers.

It's smokeless, which means they can use it in the battlefields because it doesn't show with the enemy where you are.

And the British Army carried on using it until the Falklands War.

Apparently some countries still have soya stoves tucked away in case of emergencies.

So and the army still celebrate him.

Yeah, and he doesn't come back healthy.

No, he contracted Crimea fever.

Towards the end of his time there, he also got dysentery.

So he was very, very, very ill.

And then when he got back to the UK, he published his book.

He kept, kept working and he had a fall from his horse and he started hemorrhaging and actually reading about about his last few weeks is really awful he's he's coughing blood but he's still desperately trying to work and produce things and then the blood turns to sort of black bile and it's very very clear he's going to die and he he died in 1858 so he's only 48 years old yeah he'd achieved an awful lot i mean we've talked quite a lot about alexey sawyer and his career what are your sort of final thoughts well i'm ashamed that i didn't know more about him to be honest because it seems like he's sort of the absolute proto-celebrity chef i love him i've i've talked about him a lot but no one knows who he is you have to be you know historians know him and no one else so you know but even the marketing of the products and bottling his sauces and doing all of this stuff just yeah it's incredible yeah packed a lot into a relatively short life the nuance window

This is the part of the show where Ed and I sit quietly and sup on our turkey lobster for two minutes while Annie tells us something we need to know about Alexis Soyer.

My stopwatch is ready.

You have two minutes, Annie.

Take it away.

Right.

So Alexis Soyer is best known in terms of his books for Schilling Cookery for the People, which was a massive bestseller.

But I am going to talk about this book, The Modern Housewife, which was published in 1849 and then went through subsequent editions.

And the reason I want to go through that is because he's always recognised for the magic stove and for the other book, but this one to me is unique among history books because it is written by a French chef who was almost illiterate, working through a series of secretaries.

And not only is it a brilliant book from a recipe point of view, but the way it is written is just

magic.

So he writes this book from the point of view of two Victorian English housewives writing to each other, Hortense and Héoise.

Hortense is the kind of mother figure who is advising Hélise on how she can run her household.

And it's not just, you know, here's a letter about roasts.

You know, they chat to each other, they talk about what's going on in their neighbourhood.

Throughout the different editions, their story changes.

So by 1853, Hortense has fallen upon bad times due to her husband speculating unwisely on on the railways and had to move from St.

John's Wood to Rugby, where she can now advise on other things involving poor people's food, for example.

You get really invested.

You want to buy the different books.

But interspersed with that are things that are brilliant for a food historian because you can study social history through it because of those details.

He has a picture in here which shows you apple pie, one of my favourite pictures in a book, ever, apple pie, as it ought to be, taken from still life, followed by apple pie, as they often are.

And you look at that and you think, yes, people in the Victorian times, they cocked up their food as well.

This makes me feel reassured.

But also, and the final thing about it is the recipes are fantastic.

So, I brought in route biscuits.

I've never managed to find a biscuit recipe which satisfyingly molds every single time you make it.

And as you can see from these, they are a little biscuit, a lot like a rich tea biscuit, and I'm like a rich tea, but they take a mold.

You can emboss figures onto them, and then these would have been served at balls.

So, there we go, Alexei Soye.

Fun guy, I think.

Well, listener, if you want to learn more about the history of food with Annie, check out our episode on the history of ice cream.

For more quality time with Ed in the 19th century, we've got episodes on Lord Byron and gothic vampire literature.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with friends, subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode.

But I just want to say a huge thank you to our guests.

In History Corner, we have the amazing Dr.

Annie Gray.

Thank you, Annie.

Thank you.

And in Comedy Corner, we have the excellent Ed Gamble.

Thank you, Ed.

Thank you very much.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we cook up another historical feast.

But for now, I'm off to go and invent Turkey a la Wellington.

It's basically turkey in a rubber boot.

Bye!

I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Daro Breen.

And in the all-new series of Curious Cases, things are getting curiouser and curiouser.

We'll be looking the universe squarely in the eye and demanding an answer to your everyday mysteries.

Including, can you actually die of boredom?

Why do some people taste music?

And how many lemons would it take to power a spaceship?

We will shine a light on the world's most captivating oddities.

Brought to us by you, you delightful bunch of weirdos.

I don't think you're allowed to call them that.

Ah, but I love them, really.

Curious cases.

On Radio 4.

And available now on BBC Sounds.

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